Spike Chuang’s Close Encounter with SAMs

A personal message I received the other day prompted me to look into the U-2 missions flown by Spike Jen-Liang Chuang (莊人亮). Although it is widely known that he had been shot at by Chinese surface-to-air missiles and narrowly escaped, I was surprised when I found the declassified records contain the image of the SAM taken by the camera onboard his U-2. His “take” also included the image of an unidentified missile, shown below.

In addition, Spike’s U-2 photographed a SAM site near Kunming (昆明), though it was probably not the one that fired missiles at him:

The SAM site was located at 24.54N 102.33E. Unfornately the high-resolution satellite image of this area is not yet available on Google Earth: